This report was prepared by the team of the European Centre for Minority Issues (Flensburg, Germany) with participation of experts from Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine. The listed authors do not necessarily agree to all the contents and conclusions of the report.

Problem setting The term «national minority» is widely used in the legislative base of Ukraine as well as in scientific works of a great number of scientists. However, the context of the meaning is quite different in various normative acts and scientific discourses. This fact, in its turn, leads to the absence of a concrete

This draft law was developed by Deputies Efremov A. S. (Party of Regions of Ukraine), Symonenko P.M. (the Communist Party of Ukraine) and Grinevetskuj S.R. (The Lytvyn Bloc). Even if this law keeps the legal status of the Ukrainian language as unitary official language, it contains some positions which level its official language status. Critics

Abstract: In the historic Bukovina the percentage of the minorities was superior tot hat of Romanian (52%-55%), so that the Romanian authorities found it difficult to ha ndle things. These problems were only noticed after the enthusiasm of the union to Romania and the appearance of a large set of economic, social, political land

Human Rights Without Frontiers (Website: http://www.hrwf.net) On 27 January 2009, Romanian MEP Călin Cătălin Chiriţă introduced a motion for a resolution on promoting the right to mother-tongue education for members of the Romanian minority in Ukraine. It is worth reminding that Kiev proposed to set up an international commission to monitor the rights of minorities

Many representatives of nearly eighty nationalities live in Chernivtsi region. Among them one can find Ukrainians (75%), Romanians (12, 5%), Moldavians (7,3%), Jews (2 %), Poles (0,3 %), Byelorussians (0,2%) and some Germans (0,1 %). According to the 2001 census of enumeration data there live approximately 114, 5 thousands of Romanians in Chernivtsi region. Scridb